Not to brag or anything, but this blows Canada Day out of the water. With fire.

Every American loves the Fourth of July at least a little bit. No matter what side of the political aisle you sit on the rest of the year or how you feel about the current administration, it's nice that we have at least one day every year when we can all just agree that barbecue is good, fireworks are awesome, and eagles are the best possible animal. Speaking of fire, Livid Instruments figured out how to make a MIDI organ that plays "The Star Spangled Banner" -- Hendrix style, of course -- and shoots giant gouts of fire into the air in time with the music. See this? This right here is why I'm proud to be an American. DIY engineering and fire.

It's Technical

In the video above Becky Stern refers to this LED motion sensor project as (paraphrasing here) "electric bedazzling." To borrow from my Southern linguistic heritage for a moment: Butter my butt and call me a biscuit. I'm sold. The basics are in the video; for step-by-step instructions, visit Adafruit.
(via: Laughing Squid)
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Wearable technology has been around for a while, but it's been given a particular kick in the pants recently thanks to things like the Pebble smartwatch or Google Glass. These aren't the only such projects, but they're representative of the whole. The latest video from PBS Off Book takes a look at the future of wearable technology, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that we've already put one foot in the pool as a society. Now all we need to do is jump in.

Don't you hate it when you're building the arc reactor for your Iron Man costume, but the Arduino powered circuit board you're using is just too big? Well friend, it sounds like you could use the Adafruit Gemma! It packs most of the wearable computing power you love about Adafruit's larger Flora model into to a one-inch disc. Perfect for all your arc reactor needs. Sure, the Adafruit Gemma could probably be used for a lot of different projects, but if I had one, I'd totally use it to build an arc reactor.

We called it (not that it was hard to call): Less than a week after going on sale, Microsoft's Kinect already appears to have been successfully hacked, as can be seen in the proof-of-concept video above and another below. But while a DIY electronics company called Adafruit Industries had placed a $2000 bounty on the code for an open-source Kinect driver, the NUI group hacker who pulled this off says he isn't interested in the prize, and won't be releasing the source.

While Microsoft's Kinect motion controller was met with somewhat mixed reviews when it made its debut yesterday, even its detractors acknowledged that it's an innovative piece of hardware. Now, the open source community wants to harness that potential for uses beyond XBox 360 games -- and Microsoft is none too happy about that.
New-York based DIY electronics company Adafruit Industries has placed a $2,000 bounty on an open-source driver for the Kinect. Initially, they had placed it at $1,000, but after finding out that Microsoft disapproved of the contest -- A Microsoft spokesperson told CNET that "Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products ... With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant" -- Adafruit bumped the bounty up by $1,000.